Comment Re:That's how you deal with Big Business (Score 1) 339
First of all, Free speech, as any natural human right, is restricted when it is considered to cause harm to other people. Different countries and cultures have different definitions of which speech causes harm and consequently restrict different kinds of speech. For example the USA (a good example because they declare themselves the champions of free speech), forbids the following classes of speech:
- obscenity,
- defamation,
- incitement,
- incitement to riot or imminent lawless action,
- fighting words,
- fraud,
- speech covered by government granted monopoly (copyright),
- speech integral to criminal conduct
So, regarding the brazilian case, I don't know if the allegations on the video are true of not, but that doesn't matter at this point because the candidate, as any other, has the natural human right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, and making such allegations right before the elections cause irreparable harm to the election process and consequently to the whole population of the city. If he is guilty of something, the right thing to do is to present the suspicions to the authorities for investigation, not to hold them for months/years in order to take a cheep blow to his campaign.